In a typical application environment, terminals distributed over a wide geographical range (e.g., payment terminals such as POS machine, etc.) are responsible for achieving localized applications. There terminals are connected to a terminal management system via network. For purpose of facilitating maintenance and management, the terminal management system can have an ability of remotely updating application programs on the terminals. When it is required to update the application programs, the terminal management system instructs these terminals to be connected to downloading nodes of the terminal management system via network so as to download updating data packets.
On many occasions, the update of terminal applications have to be performed at the same time node, which often results in an access to downloading nodes by a large amount of terminals within a short time period, thus causing breakdown of downloading servers due to visits in excess of limits. When the bandwidth of server is small, such a problem is more prominent. While the visits can be shunted by providing image nodes, the problem can be only alleviated and there is no way to address the problem radically, especially when the amount of terminals is enormous.
In view of the above, when remotely updating application programs on a terminal, how to effectively avoid access congestion becomes a problem that needs to be addressed urgently.